Falling in Love eBook

If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly
to be translated backward from Collins Street, Melbourne,
into the flourishing woods of the secondary geological
period—­say about the precise moment of time
when the English chalk downs were slowly accumulating,
speck by speck, on the silent floor of some long-forgotten
Mediterranean—­the intelligent colonist
would look around him with a sweet smile of cheerful
recognition, and say to himself in some surprise, ’Why,
this is just like Australia.’ The animals,
the trees, the plants, the insects, would all more
or less vividly remind him of those he had left behind
him in his happy home of the southern seas and the
nineteenth century. The sun would have moved
back on the dial of ages for a few million summers
or so, indefinitely (in geology we refuse to be bound
by dates), and would have landed him at last, to his
immense astonishment, pretty much at the exact point
whence he first started.

In other words, with a few needful qualifications,
to be made hereafter, Australia is, so to speak, a
fossil continent, a country still in its secondary
age, a surviving fragment of the primitive world of
the chalk period or earlier ages. Isolated from
all the remainder of the earth about the beginning
of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth and
the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the stage
of existence, long before the first shadowy ancestor
of the horse had turned tail on nature’s rough
draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion,
long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish
elks and colossal giraffes of late tertiary times
had even begun to run their race on the broad plains
of Europe and America, the Australian continent found
itself at an early period of its development cut off
entirely from all social intercourse with the remainder
of our planet, and turned upon itself, like the German
philosopher, to evolve its own plants and animals
out of its own inner consciousness. The natural
consequence was that progress in Australia has been
absurdly slow, and that the country as a whole has
fallen most woefully behind the times in all matters
pertaining to the existence of life upon its surface.
Everybody knows that Australia as a whole is a very
peculiar and original continent; its peculiarity,
however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in
the fact that it still remains at very nearly the
same early point of development which Europe had attained
a couple of million years ago or thereabouts.
“Advance, Australia,” says the national
motto; and, indeed, it is quite time nowadays that
Australia should advance; for, so far, she has been
left out of the running for some four mundane ages
or so at a rough computation.